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How a failed suicide bomber became key to Islamic State hostage talks

Sajida al-Rishawi is at the centre of a hostage-swap negotiation after Islamic State militants demanded her release in exchange for Kenjji Goto

Sajida al-Rishawi shows an explosive belt as she confesses on Jordanian TV to her failed bid to set off an explosives belt inside one of the three Amman hotels in 2005. (AP FILE PHOTO)

By Bloomberg

Mon., Jan. 26, 2015

Sajida al-Rishawi hid a belt of explosives and another packed with ball bearings under her baggy, floor-length coat and set off with her husband to blow up a hotel full of wedding guests in Jordan’s capital in November 2005. Her bomb failed to explode.

Nine years later, al-Rishawi is at the centre of a hostage-swap negotiation after Islamic State militants demanded her release from a Jordanian prison where she’s held on death row, in exchange for Kenji Goto, a Japanese journalist they’ve threatened to kill. A shackled Goto explained the group’s demands in a video Saturday where he held up a photo of the decapitated body of a second Japanese hostage.

The purported Islamic State demand has sparked a torrent of speculation about why this woman in her mid-40s has been singled out as subject for negotiation. The answer may be explained by a combination of her links to Abu Masub al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian- born leader of Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch, killed in a 2006 U.S. air strike, and an attempt by Islamic State to test the waters for high-value prisoner swaps.

“Getting governments started on the habit of prisoner swapping is kind of like a gateway drug,” Joseph Franco, an associate research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “You start with a little weed, then you end up with really nasty stuff up your veins.”

Last year, Jordan returned a Libyan jihadist in exchange for the Jordanian ambassador to Libya, who had been taken hostage. The kingdom is now looking for ways to free a pilot captured by Islamic State after his plane crashed in Syria last month during a mission against the militant group.

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Al-Rishawi is the sister of a close aide of al-Zarqawi, who was one of the masterminds of the Amman hotel attacks, Jordan’s Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher told Cable News Network in 2005. Zarqawi’s cell in Iraq was the nucleus of Islamic State, said Fayez Dweiri, a retired major general in the Jordanian army and a military analyst. Al-Zarqawi, a close collaborator of Osama bin Laden, was at one time the commander of Islamic State’s reclusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Al-Rishawi was spared execution after Jordan imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2006. Capital punishment was revived in 2014, putting al-Rishawi at risk.

In a 2005 confession on Jordanian television days after the hotel bombings, Al-Rishawi described her journey from Iraq to Jordan and how her husband had taught her how to use the bomb in a rented apartment, according to an account in the Guardian newspaper.

Al-Rishawi described the wedding at the hotel attended by children, women and men, and said that once inside the venue, she had gone to one corner and her husband the other.

“My husband organized everything,” al-Rishawi said in the Jordanian broadcast, translated and aired on CNN. Her husband detonated his bomb and she tried to explode her belt but it wouldn’t detonate, so she “left running” with other people in the hotel. Al-Rishawi fled to an apartment where she was later arrested.

During the broadcast Al-Rishawi was shown wearing the disarmed explosive belt over her coat and demonstrating how she planned to pull a red cord to detonate the explosives, the Guardian reported.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Monday that Japan would do its utmost to free Goto with the co-operation of the Jordanian government and various other groups. He didn’t give any details about possible negotiations.

Suga said the militant group’s video appeared genuine and that the murdered hostage was Haruna Yukawa, a self-styled security contractor. Yukawa was captured by Islamic State in July, prompting Goto, a devout Christian and acquaintance of Yukawa, to head to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to seek his release.

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